Employee Joy!
The most important component of long-term sustainable advantage for any firm –regardless of its size--is its ability to attract, retain, inspire, and grow talent.
Talent is the sustainable advantage.
It is talent and only talent that creates and/or preserves every other form of sustainable advantage whether it be innovation, new ideas or superior service.
If a Brand is experience it is employees who ideate, create, design, and deliver the experience.
If cost management is a key goal, then focusing on a fewer better paid and trained employees working at their full potential with minimum external monitoring, but maximum internal motivation is likely to yield lower costs than hiring the cheapest labor.
Employees as advocates.
Today potential employees and customers have access online to a spectrum of resources to evaluate culture and advocacy of existing employees of a firm.
Employee advocates attract other employees and are the best salespeople to convince potential customers.
So maybe instead of focusing on customers or technology or shareholders we should focus on the key to everything.
Employee Joy.
Employee Joy.
Rather than Net Promoter Scores, ESG goals, ROI metrics we should better understand the people who drive the results we are monitoring.
Let us focus on the players rather than the equipment, the field, or the scoreboard.
There are several ways to evaluate employee joy from observed metrics such as average tenure, turn over, percent of offers accepted, the premium one has to offer to hire a person, to exit interviews, custom surveys, focus groups, town halls, and tracking comments on third party sites and more.
Regardless of how and what one measures what is key is that every manager up to the CEO recognize and be motivated so that a huge portion of their success and compensation is based on how they lead, nurture, and grow people.
Many studies of the best CEO’s show they tend to focus on three key areas which are strategy, capital allocation and people rather than operations, revenue generation, investor relations or customer management. And those who have been superb at strategy and capital allocation like a Jeff Bezos but did not pay enough attention to people have recognized that it is now key.
Why is the importance of employee joy growing?
Today regardless of the type of job one is trying to fill whether it be a cook for a restaurant or an engineer firms have open jobs they struggle to fill even with significant compensation increases.
Some of this may be attributed to government benefits that enable one to not work at least temporarily.
But the issue is far deeper as we approach the two-year anniversary of the Covid-19 Virus which has through a combination of separating an employee from their place of work, concentrating one’s mind on the fragility of life and breaking rote habits has made many people re-think their lives and careers.
According to a recent Microsoft Survey 41% of employees globally are thinking of handing in their notice with that number soaring to 54% among generation Z ( 18 to 25 year olds).
And by companies insisting on a return to office when neither Covid is gone or talent are hankering for old ways gives further pause to the very people they are trying to cajole, threaten or implore back to containers and ways of the past.
What do employees want? How to ensure joy?
Regardless of industry, country or demographic group research conducted for Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data identified six components of joy:
Money: People expect to be paid fairly.
Fame (Recognition): We all want to be recognized and feted for what we do even if it is to be acknowledged for a well completed project
Power (Autonomy): For some people this is authority but increasingly it is autonomy to be able to get a job done in ways and places that fit versus being monitored and micro-managed.
Connectedness (to bosses/fellow workers/customers): While work is not family it is a part of one’s identity, a portion of one’s community and feeling connected in positive ways to a boss, fellow workers and clients/customers who are respectful versus treating one as servile.
Purpose (Values and Culture of company): Increasingly purpose drives a lot of career decisions especially among Millennials and Generation Z. Purpose is about a set of behaviors and not just words and Culture is what happens when nobody is looking rather than posters and chants!
Growth (including skills): Every few years the landscape of every industry is changing and in addition to career growth many individuals are looking to build skills that will keep them relevant and sought after so they do not find themselves unemployable. Training programs, opportunities to try new assignments or work in different markets are all critical to growth.
Companies that win in the long run tend to deliver on all six but are particularly good at connectedness, purpose, and growth since this retains and grows talent for the long run.
As technology expands and gets more powerful and cheaper more and more work done by carbon based analog feeling things (humans) will be replaced by silicon based digital computing objects (computers) and the companies that thrive will combine the best of technology with the best of talent working with joy.
Because low-cost talent with no joy is an unfeeling commodity that can be replaced by a machine or can be underbid by someone with cheaper FTE (a full-time equivalent which itself telegraphs we are all replaceable widgets!)
Employee joy is all!
Miniature Dioramas by Tatsuya Tanaka from the Miniature Calendar Series. (Thank you to David Thurm former Chief Operating Officer of the Art Institute of Chicago and a reader of this thought letter for pointing me to them as something to feature. Take a look, they are amazing.)
What If? Imagine Then …
A series of thought experiments that one may apply to a range of topics.
A few examples.
Return to the office.
What if there is a company operating in 2021 where keys to remaining competitive are attracting and retaining a diverse workforce of highly skilled talent, ensuring flexibility/agility, and competing with several new start-ups.
Imagine then if one of that firm’s priorities is to get employees back to the office since it is” critical “to build culture, training, and relationships”. After all ideas cannot be generated outside of the office (though that was the reason for off-sites), relationships cannot be built online or at events or locations outside an office such as restaurants and bars or conferences (which is where people went to collaborate and network) and one cannot learn or be educated anywhere but the office despite most significant learning taking place outside it. Finally, culture can only be built in the office which is another name for a museum of old artifacts infused with essential history and senior folks working in the guild of “tradition” and “apprenticeship” of some nostalgic age.
The Importance of Speed.
What if speed is indeed a competitive weapon and moving fast provides one an edge in hyper fluctuating and reacting markets.
Imagine then if in this need for espresso action every decision is lovingly percolated like at high tea or Japanese tea ceremony. Months pass between sending a Request for Proposal (RFP), receiving responses and an actual decision being made. Where more time is spent evaluating a decision than if the decision had been made and market reaction gauged, and a program adapted with real world data to determine its viability.
The Cost of Differentiated Inputs.
What if there is abundant evidence that the difference in productivity and impact between an excellent talent and an average talent can be 10x in knowledge industries and that most companies understanding this justify significant multiples in compensation for their top talent and management versus that of the average worker.
Imagine then if the focus of the organization is to zero base budget costs and find the lowest priced suppliers to whom they can pay the least in the slowest way possible way. This approach may impact who is placed on the business, the attention it gets and the quality of suppliers who might work with the firm. But, if one believes an hour of input is an hour of input one should also buy meat in volume since after all there is no difference in what part of the cow is purchased since the hoof should have the same quality as Kobe beef !
The Importance of Time.
What if one has 75 years of a physically healthy life. Someone in their mid-forties therefore has less than 10,000 days left and someone turning 60 is dwindling down to less than 5000. What if time is the only asset and as Franz Kafka said the meaning of life is that it ends.
Imagine then if time is taken for granted. By you or by others. When people ask for time for no or little compensation (earning, learning or joy of doing). When one delays, procrastinates, dithers, and lingers.
The Definition of Success.
What if a definition of success is to have the freedom to spend time in the way that gives one joy? This joy is often accompanied by a sense of flow when deeply immersed in doing, a feeling of grace and serenity when feeling as one with all around and often excitement and ecstasy of pleasurable pursuits.
Imagine then living in other people’s minds trying to ensure they think highly of us. Pursuing the plumbing and process of life and forgetting the poetry and passion. Watching the scoreboard and losing track of the ball.
Re-Thinking Presentations
As we re-imagine the future of work without an office as its center of gravity, we may also want to question why we spend so much time developing and presenting decks.
A case can be made that most presentation decks are:
a) Un-necessary.
b) Too long.
c) A celebration of process versus product.
d) A mechanism of management control.
e) A waste of talent, time, and treasure.
f) A placebo pill for what can be cured with a conversation.
It may be time to re-think presentation decks.
If the meeting is central to the vocabulary of work, the presentation is often the alphabet.
Remember the office where we would spend times in meetings?
We really were not in meetings but in “stare-athons” where we all gathered around a table and stared at a projected image on a central screen where the slides accompanied by the drone of a series of presenters slowly crawled forward. To distract ourselves from this slideware we would stare at the laptop or tablet in front of us or on the mobile phone lodged somewhere discretely.
The deck we were subjected too had probably gone through many revisions because of being hoisted up and down an organization with different “interested parties” fine tuning the words, calibrating tone, and working on nuance to create a hollow collection of buzz-word bingo of style without substance, points without perspective, platitudes without provocation and paths without a place to get to.
The presentation often became the point.
The process became the goal.
The communication vehicle became the destination.
Why the need for a deck?
At Amazon legend has it there are no PowerPoints at key meetings. Rather a Word document well written and reasoned is distributed and read by everybody at the meeting. Then a real meeting which involves discussion and interrogation of the material takes place. Everybody has the same information and reading the information is far more time effective than being paraded through a few words or charts flashed in sequence slowly.
In many cases even this well-crafted Word document may not be needed and could lead to as much pre-machination and massaging as a PowerPoint deck.
Next time we ask for a deck or are asked to write a deck maybe we should start by asking why?
Often there are real reasons and needs to pull together a deck from a business pitch to a strategic plan but often it is a lame substitute for a conversation, a mechanism to delay decisions, a way to extract information from a supplier or partner for free or just the way to “make work” or pretend to work. How much of your time is spent preparing or reviewing decks?
So let us ask
a) What are we trying to achieve or communicate?
b) Is a deck the best way of doing so? Or can we have a conversation, have a meeting without a deck, or send an email?
c) If it is how can we distill it down to key points and minimize the time spent on putting it together?
Why most decks should be no longer than 9 slides.
Think of all the presentation you have sat through or produced. Many were fifty, sixty or hundred slides long. How many slides do you remember? How many stood out or made a difference?
Presentations are often un-necessarily long because:
a) We often confuse volume with quality.
b) Many people feel without a huge deck they cannot justify their expenses or point of view.
c) Often firms are paid by time exerted so they are incentivized to bloat and be baroque.
d) We often focus on how the colon works versus showing the cool shit by spending too much time about the process, the background, the history, the tools, the sources of data versus delivering the idea, insight, innovation, or imagination.
If we need more than nine slides to tell our story, sell our point of view, or close a deal, we may not have anything truly convincing, differentiated, or interesting.
Over the years here is some learning gleaned from the best story tellers, salespeople, and communicators reduced to a simple exercise.
The best presentations are ones where you write the deck but never present or share it.
Begin with a letter size sheet of paper and a pen or pencil.
Place the sheet so it is in landscape mode.
Pretend you are playing tic tac toe and draw two vertical and two horizontal lines.
You now are looking at a slide view of nine slides on a single piece of paper.
Slide 9 is the appendix slide where you will list supporting material and will be the last slide you fill in.
Slide 8 is the Desired Action slide which highlights what you want to get from the meeting/ have the person you are presenting to act on.
This is the first slide that you fill in since this is what the point of the meeting you are having is.
Then the focus of your work is slide 4, 5 and 6 which you may want to label Insights, Ideas, Imagination. What insights about customer, consumer, marketplace, competition will you be sharing that get your audience to THINK differently? What one two or three big ideas are you delivering that will make their customers or consumers SEE them differently? What provocations, perspectives, points of view are you communicating that will get your audience to FEEL differently about their business, their future or you?
The goal of slide 4, 5 and 6 is to make sure you get the action you are looking for on slide 8.
Slide 7 is the Proof on why you or your firm should be believed, and this is where you show or share the cool results you have driven for other people.
Now you are ready to write the opening slides 1, 2 and 3 which are very key. Slide 1 should be a title that will make your audience come to attention, slide 2 a promise or some other benefit or outcome you will drive (e.g. your firm will generate 20 percent improvement or x or y) and then slide 3 which is the agenda slide or navigation slide which notes that you will be sharing ideas, insights, imagination and supporting material….but are ready to jump into any section based on what your audience is interested in first or how you have read the room at the beginning.
Finally slide 9 which is the appendix of all the supporting material that the first 8 slides are built on and can include data, cases, and other stuff.
Once you write this out you will find that you can make the entire presentation often without the presentation and at minimum you no longer have a long ponderous deck.
Instead, we have perspectives, provocations, points of view, insights, ideas, imagination, promises of delivery and a warehouse of stuff they can rummage through assuming they are interested.
Try this approach.
It works both as a way of doing but more importantly as a way of getting points across, telling stories, making a sale, and differentiating from others.
Success = 5P’s
Photograph by Hengki Koentjoro
One way to define success is to have the freedom to spend time in the way that gives one joy.
Every person has a combination of different elements that bring them joy from adventure to learning to practicing craft to helping others to building wealth to family to passions and hobbies.
This joy is often accompanied by a sense of flow when deeply immersed in doing, a feeling of grace and serenity when feeling as one with all around and often excitement and ecstasy of pleasurable pursuits.
Whether at life or at work success is dependent on many variables from inheritance to luck to chance which we do not control and to some things somewhat more in our control.
These include 5 Ps of Purpose, perspective, perceptiveness, pioneering, and persistence.
Photograph by Hengki Koentjoro
Purpose: Sooner or later those who succeed have a sense of where they are trying to go and some clear goals.
A star to steer by and outcomes to measure progress against.
If one does not know where one is trying to go it is unlikely one can get there.
In time this purpose or these purposes get chiseled into one’s individual DNA or the fabric and culture of successful companies.
When a company is successful it is often seen as driven by a purpose, it has teams built with individuals passionately aligned against a common outcome.
The passion many equate with those who succeed are usually driven by a focus and ferociousness of purpose.
Photograph by Hengki Koentjoro
Perspective: With time and experience comes a sense of perspective.
An understanding that the world does not revolve around oneself which allows one to become more empathetic, generous and invest in relationships.
A sense of perspective also brings with it the realization that life and career while in one way are short in other ways span decades and will bring a tangle of good and bad, ups and downs. To succeed one needs to grimace and march on in the bad times while not losing all sense of proportion and propriety when the force appears to be with us.
Perspective is also important to companies, so they see where they fit in their eco-systems and can determine both who to partner with but also to visualize their category broadly enough to see opportunities and threats outside a narrow slice of geography, time, or market.
Successful people and firms also put things in perspective when explaining and making their case. They place things in historical or other frameworks to build convincing stories.
Photograph by Hengki Koentjoro
Perceptiveness: The Cambridge dictionary defines someone who is perceptive as one who is “very good at noticing and understanding things that many people do not notice”.
This noticing and understanding can be about being emphatic in how one deals with people or seeing a niche or hiccup in a process that many may miss or to be self-aware of one’s weaknesses and mental models.
Today we live in a connected, collaborative world where people are looking for customized solutions. While data informs, insight and the wisdom are extracted by the perceptive.
Perception can be honed and grown and will be a key for success as it will be what helps differentiate carbon based analog feeling individuals from increasingly powerful silicon based digital computing machines.
Our perception and their power and precision will be what will drive profitable results.
Photograph by Hengki Koentjoro
Pioneering: Long lasting firms innovate, invent and are idea driven. They do not let their roots tie them down but rather use roots to feed their wings to fly to the future. These innovations can be across a range of a company’s system from supply chain to logistics to customer service to pricing to engineering breakthroughs to re-thinking their business.
To succeed as an individual eventually everyone needs to become who they are.
We need to find our voice and superpower and each of us in doing so pioneer by becoming special and differentiated in our own way.
Defining oneself is an act of pioneering.
Switching jobs, cities and goals are all acts of taking a different path and trading the known for the unknown.
Photograph by Hengki Koentjoro
Persistence: Part of persistence is continued practice.
Practice of a craft, a skill, an art.
A portion of it is patience and recognizing that the reaction to a thing is what will determine how the thing affects us and often not reacting but instead waiting is the most prudent thing to do.
A lot of persistence is recognizing that it is in the everyday doing, the everyday improvements, the everyday re-invention and repair after setbacks that forge us in the foundry and furnace of industry and life.
It is sculpting each block of stone and placing them together that builds the cathedral.
Day by day.
Year by year.
The power of compounding skills, relationships, and returns.
How every “overnight” success comes to be…
Dawn of a New Era: Re-invented Marketing
Photograph by Rishad Tobaccowala.
Philip Kotler defined marketing as “understanding and meeting customer requirements”.
Over the past two decades due in great part to the Internet, the power of the customer has increased significantly. We can now search options and prices, share, and learn from experiences of others, interact with Brands, and get products and services delivered in a myriad of ways at far greater speeds.
Companies do not enable and empower but need to deal with empowered and enabled people. People who due to the power of technology have “God-like” power.
Combine this with the increased power of platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Snap, Tik-Tok, Disney, Walmart, Target, etc. which are business drivers and not just communication or marketing channels, requires a re-thinking of marketing.
In addition, the demographic shifts of rising multi-ethnicity, combined with the sharp divide in the mindset, media usage, social concerns and financial outlook among youth and a rapidly aging population, further roils the landscape.
The most forward-thinking companies have significantly expanded the role of the CMO to include experience design, customer service, growth initiatives and data strategy to reflect this new landscape.
They realize that we are in a Marketing Renaissance.
One that requires us to re-invent how we think and organize.
The Five Shifts: Audience, Brand, Content, Data and Enterprise.
Clearly the challenges and opportunities facing companies are complex. Here is framework, the ABCDE of Re-invented Marketing, that attempts to simplify without dumbing down the key issues that we all have to face.
Audience: Who we are marketing too, how we reach them, and their mindset has shifted greatly over the past decade.
a) From Consumers to People with God Like Power: The biggest mistake companies make is they view things through the lens of their Brands and see us as Consumers.
Very few people define themselves by the brand they consume.
Even an incredible company like Procter and Gamble with dozens of billion-dollar brands cannot understand people if they looked only through the lens of their Brands (they are too sophisticated to do that) because at the core all their Brands are about dirt removal. Dirt removal from your teeth, clothes, dishes, butt, kids butt etc. Do you define yourself by dirt removal?
Or consider brands that fixate on wanting to have “relationship” with you. Very few people want to have a relationship with a brand. They want their headache to go away rather than enter a relationship with Tylenol.
It is key to think about people and not consumers.
b) From passive to interactive: A decade and a half ago we thought of people we marketed to as an audience since they were primarily passive receivers. Today they create, share, and interact and some of them are so impactful that we call them Influencers and Creators and there is an entire ecosystem of Influencer and Marketing.
In many cases they begin a “campaign” and marketers respond to what has been created!
c) From Segmentation to Re-aggregation: As media becomes almost completely digital, we need to understand that people come to digital media one at a time. There is no mass media that we segment by finding channels or magazines with high proportion of the people we are marketing too. The power of Google, Facebook and increasingly connected television is the ability of self-service tools to buy and scale individual interactions one at a time. We no longer are going from a cow of a mass audience to a steak of a segmented audience. Rather we are re-aggregating single pieces of mince into a hamburger.
Brands: Brands continue to be important but the way they are built is changing greatly. Today, Experiences, Purpose and Employee Joy matter the most in building Brands. These changes explain the long-term secular decline of advertising and communication but the renaissance and rise of marketing.
a) From Communication to Experiences: Jeff Bezos of Amazon said some companies spend 30 percent of resources on building a better product or experience and 70 percent telling people about it. Others spend 70 percent of their effort on product and service and 30 percent on telling people about it. Jeff said Amazon was the latter company.
In an era of empowered people connected to each other the focus should be on the experience. The brand is the experience and experiences are the brand.
b) From Great Words to Purposeful Behavior: Purpose matters more than ever especially in today’s time of social, financial and health challenges. Purpose is not some words left to wander on a lonely corporate website but the way a company or brand behaves.
c) Employees as Brand Advocates and Key to Purpose and Experience: If a company does not invest and treat its employees well it will be very challenged on both the experience front (angry, tired, and worried employees do not deliver great products or experiences) but also any purpose statement rings hollow if you cannot look after your own people.
We will soon understand that even more important than net promoter scores of customers are the net joy scores of employees.
Content: Content has always been a key to marketing. The three big differences are that there is much more of it, it is far faster and there are many new ways of making it.
a) Think Poetry and not just Plumbing: Today in a world of granular targeting and algorithmic trading we can get the right interaction to the right person at the right time. But what are we paying as much attention to the interaction as getting it there? We must think of the poetry and not just the plumbing.
b) Think response not just creation: Many campaigns are started by people. Memes or perspectives of about your brand can ricochet all over the world and you need to ensure that in today’s world of weaponized platforms you have a world class risk intelligence partner and a rapid action team to identify and manage detractors and other instigators.
c) People choose with their hearts and use numbers to justify what they do: Content that moves people is content that moves product.
Data: Data is key to future of marketing. It is like electricity. It illuminates. Without strong data a company cannot compete. It is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Because just like few companies differentiate themselves by how they use electricity, very few companies will find a competitive edge in data. It will be a key ingredient and not the be all or end all of strategy. And very few companies will be able to live on their own data. The three areas to focus on data are
a) Quality versus Quantity: If 90 percent on data has been created in the last two years most companies “data lakes” are filled with muck/mud/ slime and lots of dead fish.
b) Real Time Access and not just Ownership: First party relationships with people who buy from you are key. Using only platforms as the roadways to reach them will lead to high tolls or blockades. But first party data alone is not enough and how to access and partner with other firms both to build a better understanding and bridge to people but also to design better and more comprehensive products and solutions.
c) Meaning versus Math: Data is not information, knowledge, or wisdom. Algorithms are bias embedded in code. How do you integrate, interpolate, interrogate data, and involved diverse mindsets, interconnect to larger trends and add imagination to make meaning from math?
Enterprise: If a company is to deliver experiences in a world of people with God like power, while steering itself with a purpose and looking after its stakeholders particularly its employees but also making sure it delivers tangible results today, it will have to sculpt itself into a new form by building new muscles.
a) The Paranoid Die. The Schizophrenic Thrive: Andy Grove the late CEO of Intel said only the paranoid survive. In today’s age where we need to connect and work together this leads to polarized and insular thinking which explains why Intel has become a shell of itself and is a shadow in the world of Taiwan Semi-Conductor, Nvidia, AMD and ARM (which Nvidia might buy).
Rather than Paranoia the right mindset is Schizophrenia. Companies should run two models. One focused on delivering today and the other on building a new tomorrow where some of the best talents are given all the assets of the companies and none of the liabilities and asked to do whatever it takes to move into the future including eating and harming today’s cash cows.
b) Culture is the result of what fear free, diverse people do when no one is watching: To navigate change companies need fear free cultures of diverse people and mindsets led by leaders who continuously learn, incentivize and train for change and worship no sacred cows.
c) Trust is speed: If a company wants to be high velocity it must be one built on trust. A company where intent is clear, decision making transparent and leaders are accountable is one where speed, innovation happens and “cover your ass deck writing” and meetings to prepare for meetings are minimized.
Marketing has never been as exciting and thrilling but just like a roller-coaster ride many of us might feel our stomachs churning, our hearts beating wildly, and our vision blurred.
Hopefully the ABCDE framework may help make the most of the thrills while minimizing the ills.